ISSS608 2016 17T1 Group6 Project Report
| Proposal |
Contents
Motivation
Motivation of the application:
In recent years, terrorism attacks in the western world are the centre of focus and receive extensive reporting. However, terrorist attacks in the Middle East, South America, Africa and South Asia often receive much less attention or totally neglected. This creates a perspective that is far from the truth. We aim to present a holistic picture of the global terrorist attacks: across time, countries, targets and methods, to help the viewers have a better understanding of terrorist attacks in various countries during different periods of time.
Past Works
Review and critic past works:
http://start.umd.edu/gtd/globe/index.html (bars height as number of attacks)
http://terror.periscopic.com/ (A world of terror)
http://www.shorttails.io/a-timeline-of-terrorism/ (A Timeline of Terrorism)
Design Framework
A detail description of the design principles used and data visualisation elements built (Refer to Section 3: Interface of this paper [1].
Sample dashboard to imitate:
http://anmolkoul.github.io/#
File:Dashboard
Sample spinning globe to imitate:
http://bl.ocks.org/PatrickStotz/1f19b3e4cb848100ffd7
File:Sample globe
Demonstration
Sample test cases
Discussion
What has the audience learned from your work? What new insights or practices has your system enabled? A full blown user study is not expected, but informal observations of use that help evaluate your system are encouraged.
Future Work
Visualisation Recommendations
We wish to improve our visualisation dashboard by linking the Text Cloud to the cross filter. At the moment this is not achievable as we could not keep the time dimension after breaking the words into tokens.
We also hope to add tooltips to show the terrorist attack details when the mouse hovering on different parts of the map. We give up on showing the details of individual events because there will be too many points on the map, which makes the web page extremely slow and prone to crash. However, we believe there should be a better way of adding event specific information.
Dataset Recommendations
The dataset has too many irrelevant words and missing data in the motivation column. Most of the motivations records tend to be about violate incidents in the United States, whereas the attacks that caused large numbers of casualties often have no motivation records. Clearer motivations will help identify the keywords in the Word Cloud and come up with strategies to tackle the root cause of terrorist attacks.
The dataset also has a large proportion of unknown information or missing records, which makes the analysis of certain aspects difficult. For instance, the classification of International Attacks has around 60% of the records being unknown. As a result, we could not use the variable for analysis as it does not show a clear enough picture. The data needs more updates to be more complete.
Guides
Installation Guide - including hardware configuration and software integrationn. User Guide - Step-by-step guide on how to use the data visualisation functions designed.
